Abstract

We report a passively mode-locked vertical external cavity surface emitting laser (VECSEL) producing 400 fs pulses with 4.35 kW peak power. The average output power was 3.3 W and the VECSEL had a repetition rate of 1.67 GHz at a center wavelength of 1013 nm. A near-antiresonant, substrate-removed, 10 quantum well (QW) gain structure designed to enable femtosecond pulse operation is used. A SESAM which uses fast carrier recombination at the semiconductor surface and the optical Stark effect enables passive mode-locking. When 1 W of the VECSEL output is launched into a 2 m long photonic crystal fiber (PCF) with a 2.2 µm core, a supercontinuum spanning 175 nm, with average power 0.5 W is produced.

Figures (5)

Schematic of the resonant (a) and near-antiresonant (b) gain structures. The positions of the quantum wells are represented by short vertical red lines. The calculated intensity on the quantum wells versus wavelength is shown in (c) and the device dispersion is shown in (d).

(a) Top photoluminescence emitted from the resonant and near-antiresonant structures with an incident pump power of 28.5 W. (b) Output power versus pump power for different output coupler transmission for the resonant and (c) near-antiresonant structures.